The simplest way to obtain a virtual machine image that works with OpenStack is to download one that someone else has already created. Most of the images contain the cloud-init package to support SSH key pair and user data injection. Because many of the images disable SSH password authentication by default, boot the image with an injected key pair. You can SSH into the instance with the private key and default login account. See the OpenStack End User Guide for more information on how to create and inject key pairs with OpenStack.

The CentOS project maintains official images for direct download. CentOS 6 images CentOS 7 images In a CentOS cloud image, the login account is centos.

CirrOS is a minimal Linux distribution that was designed for use as a test image on clouds such as OpenStack Compute. You can download a CirrOS image in various formats from the CirrOS download page. If your deployment uses QEMU or KVM, we recommend using the images in qcow2 format. The most recent 64-bit qcow2 image as of this writing is cirros-0.3.4-x86_64-disk.img. In a CirrOS image, the login account is cirros. The password is cubswin:)

Canonical maintains an official set of Ubuntu-based images. Images are arranged by Ubuntu release, and by image release date, with "current" being the most recent. For example, the page that contains the most recently built image for Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" is http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/trusty/current/. Scroll to the bottom of the page for links to images that can be downloaded directly. If your deployment uses QEMU or KVM, we recommend using the images in qcow2 format. The most recent version of the 64-bit QCOW2 image for Ubuntu 14.04 is trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img. In an Ubuntu cloud image, the login account is ubuntu.

Red Hat maintains official Red Hat Enterprise Linux cloud images. A valid Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription is required to download these images. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 KVM Guest Image Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 KVM Guest Image In a RHEL cloud image, the login account is cloud-user.

The Fedora project maintains a list of official cloud images at . In a Fedora cloud image, the login account is fedora.

SUSE provides images for openSUSE. For SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), custom images can be built with a web-based tool called SUSE Studio. SUSE Studio can also be used to build custom openSUSE images.

Since January 2015, Debian provides images for direct download. They are now made at the same time as the CD and DVD images of Debian. However, until Debian 8.0 (aka Jessie) is out, these images are the weekly built images of the testing distribution. If you wish to build your own images of Debian 7.0 (aka Wheezy, the current stable release of Debian), you can use the package which is used to build the official Debian images. It is named openstack-debian-images, and it provides a simple script for building them. This package is available in Debian Unstable, Debian Jessie, and through the wheezy-backports repositories. To produce a Wheezy image, simply run: # build-openstack-debian-image -r wheezy If building the image for Wheezy, packages like cloud-init, cloud-utils or cloud-initramfs-growroot will be pulled from wheezy-backports. Also, the current version of bootlogd in Wheezy doesn't support logging to multiple consoles, which is needed so that both the OpenStack Dashboard console and the nova console-log console works. However, a fixed version is available from the non-official GPLHost repository. To install it on top of the image, it is possible to use the --hook-script option of the build-openstack-debian-image script, with this kind of script as parameter: #!/bin/sh cp bootlogd_2.88dsf-41+deb7u2_amd64.deb ${BODI_CHROOT_PATH} chroot ${BODI_CHROOT_PATH} dpkg -i bootlogd_2.88dsf-41+deb7u2_amd64.deb rm ${BODI_CHROOT_PATH}/bootlogd_2.88dsf-41+deb7u2_amd64.deb In a Debian image, the login account is admin.

As of this writing, we are not aware of other distributions that provide images for download.

Rackspace Cloud Builders maintains a list of pre-built images from various distributions (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu). Links to these images can be found at rackerjoe/oz-image-build on GitHub.

Cloudbase Solutions hosts an OpenStack Windows Server 2012 Standard Evaluation image that runs on Hyper-V, KVM, and XenServer/XCP.